Robert Bittman (right), deputy to Kenneth Starr as independent counsel, hands a report to then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, getting the impeachment of Bill Clinton underway in 1998. Bill Clinton survived; both Starr and Gingrich have gone through subsequent rises and falls; now Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee. But how deep a mark did those years leave on her? (Reuters photo)

A reader from the United States who now lives in Europe observes with alarm the recent trend in the polls. He is responding specifically to this item by Ron Fournier, arguing that on fundamentals Hillary Clinton should be enjoying a very wide lead over Donald Trump rather than the very narrow edge that the latest polls show:

We’re going to find out in less than four months if The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has won. (I deliberately put TVRWC in capitals, and not in quotes, because I’ve always believed it’s real. I’m not paranoid. I do believe in the self-organizing properties of complex systems.)

And if TVRWC has won, it will not have won on the battlefield of public opinion. It will have won inside Hillary Clinton’s head. Because it has been there that TVRWC planted the seeds of effective self-destruction, to be fertilized by Clinton’s worst instincts and tendencies. [Referring to the self-protective fear of investigations that may have led to HRC’s email policy, which of course ironically has opened her up to investigation.]

I’m waiting to see where the polls settle out after the two conventions. I’m not discounting that Clinton may be trailing Trump at the end of the month, even given any margin of error.

Trump’s ground game had better be as weak, and continue to be as weak, as some would now have us believe. And Clinton’s ground game had better be better than Obama’s.

Meanwhile, a view of what might be ahead in Cleveland. A reader suggests:

For the record: I want to note Trump’s penchant for grinding his heel in the faces of his defeated opponents, q.v. his treatment of Chris Christie.

Will he feel compelled to mention the absence of the Bushes? Romney? McCain? How can he not? How will he treat the NeverTrump delegates? (There won’t be a motion to make the nomination unanimous, at least before the call of the states is complete and perhaps not even then?)

You haven’t won until your opponent acknowledges you are better (more: amazing? fantastic?) than he. Even your supporters can’t get off without acknowledging you are better than they, can they? Else, your victory depended on them, no?

BTW: Have you heard the audio of Howard Stern asking Donald and Ivanka and one of the sons to multiply 17 by 6? The nation is in a LOT of trouble!

Boris Johnson, the UK’s new Foreign Minister, who shares a New York City birthplace with Donald Trump and a tonsorial flair as well. (Toby Melville / Reuters)

In response to this item last week, about Donald Trump’s occasional shift from arresting, can’t-not-watch spontaneity to unsettling, am-I-really-watching-this?? apparent loss of control, readers weigh in on the explanations.

It’s harder than it looks. A reader says that the strain is showing:

It takes an extraordinary talent to run for president (let alone be president!). It is a level of stress and demand that could break most people, even most high-performing people. In Trump, we actually have little evidence that he is extraordinary. Yes, he has an extraordinary level of narcissism and an extraordinary knack for entertainment and self-promotion. But in terms of the qualities, talents, and temperaments that get tested in a national presidential election, he is far from exceptional.

Combine this with the fact that his limitations (and struggling poll numbers) are being exposed on a national stage—which must at some level, even for Trump, be causing cognitive dissonance and a challenge to his delusional self-regard—and the campaign is simply starting to break him.

We may not witness a full “breakdown,” but I think we’re seeing early warning signs. People fight off breakdowns every day and there is no reason to think it couldn’t happen to a presidential candidate, especially one so ill-equipped to the task.

***

‘Craves attention — and acceptance — like normal people crave oxygen.’ Another hypothesis:

Let me be roughly the 10,000th reader to attempt to explain Trump (which is a fun parlor game, but less fun when talking about one of two people who will be the next leader of the free world, but I digress).

Trump craves attention like normal people crave oxygen, but he also craves acceptance. He’s started several controversies by promising to “look into” or “look at” patently crazy or racist ideas (like the lady who wanted Trump to force TSA agents to take off their “hibby jobbies”). I bet Trump would never actually force the TSA agents to take off their hijabs. But he is incapable of politely telling the woman that her idea has no merit, a task that any skillful politician learns to do….

He’ll engage in that kind of disagreement with a hostile interviewer, like a network correspondent, because for whatever reason, he isn’t trying to curry favor with them and realizes that his real audience is not the correspondent, but the viewing audience. But in all other situations, he will never object to a “friendly” statement or question; his need for immediate acceptance is too great.

A raucous political rally is addictive enough for any “normal” politician; it gives them energy and it comes through in their performance. Like musicians, theater actors or athletes, a good politician will feed off the energy of a great crowd. For a narcissist like Trump, this is the emotional equivalent of mainlining heroin. He is savvy enough that he realizes, on an intellectual level, that the TV audience for his rallies dwarfs the in-person audience. But in that moment, on an emotional high, he can’t help himself but to pander to that in person audience and give them what they want and build that feedback loop. He’s making it up as he goes to fit the in-person audience of a particular rally

The irony is that he is falling into a trap that snared many a politician when the TV era started. In person, a lot of those fiery Southern politicians of yesteryear were amazingly effective political speakers (think Huey Long). They could play on emotions and make their constituents laugh and cry and leave the rally fired up, like they just left a great tent revival. But on TV, that same speech came across as grotesque, exaggerated and cartoonish. TV favors the subtle and the soundbite. Trump, despite all of his media savvy, is allowing himself to fall into this same trap.

***

The problem is capacity—and advisors. Another reader:

I’ve come to the conclusion that Trump just isn’t very smart—shrewd about some things—but not particularly smart. And he is absolutely convinced he’s the smartest guy in the room at all times. He has these rallies, his fans love the performance, and he believes that everyone giving him advice about shifting his style and tactics is wrong because he’s smarter than them, he’s been successful thus far and the fans love him….

After all, who are the folks he acknowledges as advisors? His kids? Among the three adult ones, there isn’t an iota of political experience or knowledge. Ben Carson—seriously? Is there a single, respected and experienced political operative in the inner circle?

***

Brexit is not an omen. One of many readers emphasizing that the Brexit vote in the UK was not (contrary to Trump’s assertions) an omen of his success four months from now:

Re Brexit, but its worth pointing out that the electorates of the US and the UK are very different. While the categories don't align, whites make up 92% of the population in the UK (and probably more like 94% of the voting population) but only 64% of the population in the US (and maybe 70% of the electorate)….

Somewhere like England, Trump could gin up a lot of white support without having to worry about also moving a lot of minorities to vote against him because there just aren't that many minorities to vote. In the US, the non-white electorate is nearly an order of magnitude larger, and as you point out, the comparison may not be terribly apt.

Another way to put it: In the US, the electorate is pretty evenly split between white women, white men and minorities (36-33-31, based on 2012 and given current trends). In the UK, it's 47-47-6. In Britain, a Trumpian UKIP candidate could write off minorities and only have to win 54% of the white vote to prevail. In the US he'd have to win 73%.

Now, let's assume a candidate in the UK looks to win by writing off minorities and only winning 50% of white women (there is no way that Trump comes close to winning 50% of women, by the way). In the UK, he'd only have to win 56% of the remaining white male vote. In the US, to build the same coalition, he'd have to win 98% of white males: basically every single one. This is simplified, but it's pretty close to the coalition Trump is setting himself up for. It's not a winning hand.

***

And more on the UK/US difference. Another reader:

If the UK had had some version of our electoral college, the Brexit would likely have failed. (Or at least Scotland and Northern Ireland would perhaps still be part of the EU.)

Trump's success should scare the living hell out of anyone with an understanding of world history, not to mention American history. (And the Constitution.) And one never truly knows how any election is going to go until it's over. But while Trump's support is unsettling—especially if one considers there might be some kind of Bradley effect in...uh, effect—our electoral college makes his changes extremely unlikely. It's awfully hard to look at the maps of Obama's wins and figure out which states Trump could flip, while it's not that hard to look at those maps and figure out which Clinton might be able to flip.

That Trump wasn't bounced in the first round is amazing and frightening. But our stupid, outdated, anti-democratic electoral college is, for once, acting like a bulwark against disaster.

The 2016 dream team? The Donald and the Newt yesterday in Ohio. (Aaron Bernstein / Reuters)

In response to the previous item about last night’s genuinely deranged-seeming half-hour discourse by Donald Trump, readers offer two opposing interpretations.

First, from a reader who works in the tech industry, and is originally from Europe:

I think you’re missing something, and the thing you’re missing is that his strategy is not to try to convince “independents” or even folks like us, but instead to mobilize the non-voters of his own tribe. His belief is that this will be good enough, so no need to compromise with the enemy.

Once you see it in that context, his speech makes complete sense. Specifically, to your points:

Everybody knows Hillary is crooked, so no need to waste time on that. Instead, hammer in on the two-speed justice system, something which resonates, because it is sadly true.

The star controversy activates the “anti-PC” receptors of his crowd. Also, backing down on anything is a sign of weakness and a victory for PC, so he has to be seen as resisting it. He doesn't care if it offends you. In fact, it’s great if it does. That’s all part of the game.

None of his crowd cares what the NYT prints. Just not a factor.

It’s gibberish except for his crowd, which just needs the right triggers lined up. The precedents for this kind of rambling speech are truly scary...

We can only hope that this “energize everyone in his base to go vote” strategy will fail, but sadly Brexit shows how it can succeed, and we misjudge this at our own peril.

I really have no idea how to bridge this gap. Maybe it’s just not possible, and we are stuck doing the same thing on our side, which may well end up in a civil war. Or maybe, your “local” take will save us—people will simply disregard the federal nonsense while working locally—but sadly, even though it produces tasty micro-brews, it won’t help solve larger problems.

Thanks for keeping such a “logbook” of Trump’s behavior! After watching him for months I’m coming to the same uneasy conclusion as a lot of people and I’m curious if you think it is nuts:

He doesn’t want to be President. This has all been personal brand-building and performance art. Indeed, he never even expected to win the nomination and now he’s actively finding ways to “throw” the election. Say it ain’t so, Shoeless Donald!

If you view his behavior in that context it starts to look deviously rational instead of unhinged. But I can’t decide if devious makes more sense than unhinged. What does Occam’s Razor say?

To take the second possibility first: it is elegant to think that this is one big The Producers-style farce that got out of hand, but to me that seems too elegantly rococo an interpretation. I think he’s just being himself, instant by instant and through the whole arc of his campaign.

That’s my main reaction to the first possibility too. The effect might be to shore up and rev up the already-convinced. But I don’t know whether that’s a conscious long-term strategy so much as an instinctive response by Trump in front of his crowds. And as a purely practical matter, it’s hard to see how it could be as effective in a general election as in a GOP primary. That’s because these performances by Trump seem likely to rev up as much of his opposition — among Latinos, blacks, women, young people, etc — as they do of his base. But we’ll see.

***

For early items in the “Trump Nation” thread, you can go here. For recent ones, go here.

1) On aldermen. Kenneth Adelman and his family have been long-time good friends of our family. He is an even longer-term Republican. Ken worked in the Nixon and Ford administrations and had two senior positions under Ronald Reagan: as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and as deputy to Jeanne Kirkpatrick as ambassador to the U.N.

Ken Adelman broke with the George W. Bush administration, and with his friends of many decades Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld, over the Iraq war. But still he is no one’s idea of a Democratic party loyalist.

Thus I found it significant that he was quoted as you see below in a Daily Beast story yesterday about Republican national-security veterans who had drawn the line at Trump:

“Not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but also I am not voting for any Republican who endorsed or supported Trump—be it for Senate, House, alderman, or county clerk. And yes, I will vote for Clinton, simply because to not vote, or to vote Libertarian, would be a half-vote for Trump,” said Ken Adelman, U.S. arms control director during the Reagan administration.

***

2) Pilate Republicans. A reader from Texas suggests an addition to my taxonomy of Republican members of The Resistance — those who like Ken Adelman are publicly standing up against Trump — versus the Vichy team, those like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell (and Marco Rubio and Reince Priebus and Jon Huntsman etc) who still officially support him. The reader writes:

In light of Mitt Romney's announcement that he will vote for neither Trump nor Clinton, I'm wondering if you need to make an addition to your "Resistance" or "Vichy" Republican categories. This is a man who aspired to the presidency, but now when the phone rings at 3 a.m., demanding a decision to deal with a crisis, he rolls over and goes back to sleep.

May I suggest "Pilate Republicans?" (Of course with the same type of disclaimer regarding Jesus as your disclaimer about Hitler.) By washing his hands and withholding his vote for Candidate A, Mitt is casting half a vote for Candidate B.

Sure, I will give him partial credit but it's hard not to imagine that he clearly (if privately) would prefer a Trump loss to a Clinton loss. And yes, he, as an individual voter, does have the luxury of opting out since Hillary pretty much has a lock on Massachuesetts. But if he didn't want to be influential, he wouldn't be holding a press conference. And many of those he wants to influence are voters in swing states.

Actually, "Pilate" Republicans would really be a subset of "Resistance" Republicans. But a real resistance hero would take the political risk, and may even ameliorate it by announcing he was maximizing his vote to insure a Trump loss, without even mentioning Her.

I’m glad to have an archive of all of this. I look forward to a future where people would not believe this could have occurred except for such efforts.

For early items in the “Trump Nation” thread, you can go here. For recent ones, go here.

A reader who works in a big-city law firm thinks I missed the point in Trump Time Capsule #30. The theme of that installment was that Mitch McConnell, the relentlessly on-message leader of the Senate Republicans, had declined to call Donald Trump a “credible” presidential candidate—and that his refusal was significant.

The reader writes:

What McConnell said is merely stating the obvious, and his comment was about Trump’s ability to win the election, not about his qualifications to be President.

What I found more interesting is McConnell’s refusal last week to respond to a question about whether Trump was qualified. His silence “spoke volumes,” as they say. Can you imagine any other campaign in our lifetimes where one of a major party’s leader wasn’t willing to affirm the suitability of the party’s Presidential candidate? That’s unprecedented.

The fact is that any intelligent, reasonably well-informed, sensible adult, having watched and read about Trump, knows to a certainty that, political ideology aside, he’s absolutely unfit for the office. I have no doubt that McConnell knows that, Paul Ryan knows that, every Republican Senator (with the possible exception of Jeff Sessions) knows that. But they’re stuck with him.

I was struck by Trump’s statement today that his former opponents in the primaries should either endorse him or be “banned” from running for office. This reinforces something I’ve been thinking about regarding Trump.

Many of his supporters (and Trump himself) admire him for being willing to say what he’s thinking even if “politically incorrect.” I find nothing admirable in this trait, which I suspect is more about lack of impulse control than a principled decision to be blunt. As we become mature adults, we come to understand that there are times when you shouldn’t say what you’re thinking. Speaking out will be contrary to your own interest, or it will hurt others, or both. Remaining silent is often just good judgment.

In this case, Trump’s statement doesn’t do anything to help his campaign. Even if he were to successfully bully or shame Rubio, Cruz, Kasich or Bush into endorsing him, it’s not going to add votes to his column. In fact, his whining about not getting their endorsement makes him look weak or desperate. And, in possibly further alienating sitting Republican Senators and other Republican officials, he’s unnecessarily further damaging a relationship that, were he to be elected President, he will surely need at some point.

So, rather than exhibiting an admirable quality of bluntness, Trump once again shows that he is merely immature and lacking in judgment.

Following previous items in this thread, readers weigh in on why Donald Trump may be saying the things he does, and why his supporters are still with him.

1. On Crying Wolf. In yesterday’s item, a reader noted that reflexive, excessive use of terms like “stupid” or “bigoted” had weakened their meaning — and made it hard to signal that someone like Trump really is different from, say, Sarah Palin (who knew much more about policy than Trump does).

A reader who now serves as a mayor in a state Trump is almost certain to carry writes this:

Reading the prior note about how our terms have lost power due to overuse, it occurred to me that when Trump is called racist or sexist or hateful of a religion…that is not hurting him with many of those who are inclined to vote for him.

Those who have supported him since the start of the Republican primary are likely to be only more attracted to any candidate identified as racist. At the very least, they are people who don’t find racism as a disqualifying thing.

He started the campaign calling Mexican immigrants “criminals” and the reaction calling him “racist” endeared him to those who actually like being identified as having racist views. It jump-started his campaign, immediately connecting with people who were sitting out there holding hateful views about Hispanics. Maybe some supporters shy away from identifying themselves with the term, but they don’t back off of self-evident racist policy and social views. They are who he says he is.

2. From another reader, a shorter note about the role of “thinking” in politics:

As you recently noted, Trump is apparently always “thinking” very carefully about what will turn his audience on.

Bush and Rove were just the latest in a long list of politicians and operatives who have understood that there are times when a righteous war against a certifiable Bad Guy will make many people feel good or at least better in a way that nothing else will. So far Trump has had no trouble finding plenty of takers for his own, much more theatrical bellicosity - Mission (almost) Accomplished on steroids, as it were.

***

3. On levels of complexity in political discourse and motivation:

As a PhD candidate in cognitive psychology, I might add a little to the last writer who mentioned the distinction between "stupid" and "evil." While most angles on the Trump constituency are focused around some amalgamation of low information voters and those who don't "think," recent cognitive neuroscience research tells the opposite story.

It's not that people who buy into seemingly absurd premises don't think enough, it's that they simultaneously have elaborately thought out and yet tortuously simplistic justifications for Trump's policy positions. This is how one can take something as complex as fiscal policy or the global economy and reduce it down to base elements of race and gender delineating winners and losers.

It takes a lot of "thinking" to contort something as odious as sexism or racism into a valid justification for limiting immigration or economic opportunity. It's this same carefully crafted in-group/out-group distinction that allows people to similarly dismiss Trump calling women pigs and dogs as "rejecting political correctness" , assuredly something no one would accept if it were uttered about one's mother, sister, or daughter.

As a prime example, I note the case of John McGraw, the 78 year old North Carolina man who punched a Trump rally protester as he exited the building escorted by security. When asked about the incident, McGraw mentioned a possible link to Al-Qaeda and that the next time "we might have to kill him."

This is the mindset of an intricately constructed worldview in which political protesters could be sleeper cell terrorists. It takes a large amount of mental effort to jump through the logical hoops necessary to assume that society can easily be made great again and yet be so precipitously close to falling over the cliff of peril.

This is a feature, not a bug, in the Trump campaign.

***

4. Finally, on the interlacing roles of expression, and reflection, in making up what we think of as intelligence:

In your recent conversations regarding Trump’s intelligence, I think most of it has to do with how he expresses himself. For example, his limited vocabulary, coining words that he should know better than to use – a famous word is “bigly” – and his very simple ways of expressing relatively complex ideas regarding commerce and conflict, impact our assessment of his intelligence. [JF note: As I understand it, there is a reasonable chance that Trump intended to say “big league” as opposed to “bigly.” Still...]

I know liberals who have thought GW Bush was stupid, largely because of how he expressed himself, as well as his failure to explore his errors. Bush’s failure to reflect concerned me more than any sense of his presumed intelligence.I am much more confident in President “I screwed up,” than I was with President “Mistakes were made.”

Reagan, too, was given to expressing his ideas in uncomplicated ways. Some would suggest that this indicated a talent for communication, not a deficiency in sense or judgement. No one spoke of Romney as unintelligent (nerdy, awkward, maybe, but these are not intellectual flaws). And I know many republicans who seem to believe that democrats are either stupid or naïve.

It does go both ways, and all you have to do is listen to the patronizing tone many republicans take on foreign policy pronouncements, “their” turf. Sarah Palin remarked last week on President Obama’s stupidity, but Obama’s intelligence and patriotism are often impugned.

My assessment of intelligence is related to one’s willingness to learn. The Atlantichas covered the work of Carol Dweck in the past. Her research on growth vs fixed mindset is more related to efficacy, but I believed that it is also useful in understanding an individual’s willingness to learn new skills and information.

The ability to synthesize novel ideas or new skill sets says a great deal about individuals. One problem that many people who are employed in low-skilled occupations that later are outsourced or disappear, is that whether for lack of interest or lack of opportunity, they had not thought to acquire new skills. Does this mean they are unintelligent? No. It means that they were not interested or sufficiently foresighted to understand that tomorrow might require different information than today provided. Somehow, their plan was to win (or survive) and that didn’t work out. Lacking the interest in a Plan B, they were stuck.

The same is reflected in my understanding of Trump. He is not doing much differently now than he ever did. He speaks without much thought or reflection, because that has worked for him in the past. He is mostly skilled at expressing himself in terms of his personal interpretation of wealth and therefore, success. And it may work with some voters.

My concern with Trump is that he doesn’t seem to have information that a President ought to have at his or her disposal, or at least, he doesn’t express his knowledge base in public fora. He has not explained how his policies will work. He does not indicate that his understanding of the global economy is more than transactional, and his foreign policy interests appear to be limited. His vision is that America will win, win, win. He has not explained what he has learned so far, how he will achieve his vision, how he will work with others on a global scale. Maybe has a plan for doing this, but he has not shared any inkling of this plan with the voters, and some of us need that information.

What has he learned, as an American, an adult, a man, a father, a business person, and how does this presumed growth translate into his potential leadership? The answer to that question is much more interesting and useful to me than how “intelligent” Trump may or may not be.

The namesake of this ill-fated zeppelin, the Hindenburg, played a part in the drama mentioned in the first reader’s letter. (Wikipedia)

Who knows where things might be headed with the Trump campaign? Here is a note from a reader reflecting on what could happen if Trump wins, and another on what might occur if Trump loses.

If he wins. As mentioned before, I think “Vichy Republicans” is a useful shorthand for the likes of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Reince Priebus, John McCain, etc who are accommodating themselves to the power of the moment rather than siding with the Resistance — but who will race one another to say, “Oh, we were against him all along” if and when he goes down. But despite the usefulness of the Vichy/Resistance distinction, of course no one can be likened to Hitler.

In this first reader note, a postgrad political science student from Germany wrestles with how the historically unique evil status of Hitler deflects attention from similarities in vulnerable political systems:

I like your stance on what ‎you call the Vichy Republicans, because you are right: The individuals in question are making an historic mistake by supporting an historically unqualified short-fingered man, and whatever the outcome of the 2016 U.S. DemocraZy Games is, history will judge them… [Cutting various compliments, for which I’m grateful.]

Looking at historic precedents, folks have tried to compare Trump to Hitler. I think there is some truth to this, given his Nazi-esque predilection for scapegoating minorities, his love for white essentialism and his capability to use fear and not vision and the painting of a country in ruins as the basis of a campaign.

It seems to me that it is only a question of time until Trump proposes that Muslim Americans carry an "M" in their passports the way Jews had to have a "J" in their passports in the early years of the Third Reich…

But what I think is a more dire truth to the Hitler-Trump comparison is how he could actually come to power. When Hitler was elected it was not the case that an entire country yelled “Sieg Heil” with fanfares and right arms in the air. Instead, a lot of sane, reasonable and non-fanatic people thought “he cannot be taken serious,” or “he will never win (but I am to frustrated to vote against him anyhow,” or “he is crazy but he does have a point,” or “maybe he will at least bring a change,” to, ultimately, “let’s give him a try, he can’t make matters worse anyhow.” The rest is history.‎

My fear is that a lot of Americans think the same way about Trump, underestimating the danger he poses and the actual shot at the presidency he has, despite temporarily bad poll numbers. I really hope he will lose in November.

What can we expect after Trump loses the November election? Yes, I do believe that he will lose because I believe that there are enough voters with enough intelligence to sufficiently dread the consequences of a Trump win. I suspect that in the privacy of the voting booth not even the Senate Majority Leader or the Speaker of the House will vote for him despite what they are saying publicly.

So when he loses, what does his past behavior lead us to expect from him?

Of course, we should expect him to go to court, all the way to the Supreme Court. He will claim that the election was “rigged” against him, etc., etc. It will be as if one of the hypertrophied personae of professional wrestling were to try to rekindle the Bush-Gore court fight of 2000. The main difference this time will be that there won't be a gentleman Al Gore present to halt the match in order to save the union. One can imagine that Trump will try to summon the resources of the GOP to support his fight.

The story line of this court case will, naturally, feature the ethnicity of all the judges who rule on it. Will any of them be Mexican? Or Muslim? When this case lands in the Supreme Court, will it be paralyzed in a 4-to-4 tie? I like to imagine that the distinguished justices, ladies and gentlemen all, will also have the wisdom and decency to save the union.

On this last point, the Supreme Court was lastingly shamed by the results-oriented politicking of its Bush v. Gore decision. (You don’t have to believe me on this: turn to the dissent from the redoubtable Justice John Paul Stevens, who said: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”) If the reader’s scenario came to pass, I would like to imagine, with him, that the current Supreme Court, in its full eight-member majesty, would decide it was time to re-assert its role as “impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

A happy tableau we will not witness again: Donald Trump with now-deposed, then-campaign manager Corey Lendowski after a win this spring. (Joe Skipper / Reuters)

I am on the road again, now in southwestern Kansas with my wife Deb. As the Trump campaign runs into more obviously Hindenburg-like territory, I’ll try to catch up with some reflections on what the Trump era has meant, whatever might be the future of his candidacy.

Let’s start with some responses on “does Trump think”?

1. Consider Nick Saban. Someone who will be voting for the first time writes:

I just graduated from high school, and for people my age this is generally the first election anyone has paid attention to. Rather an interesting way to get introduced to politics.

A reader on the latest “Does Trump Think?” installment pointed out that, in his view, the other readers (and you) considered yourself the high-and-mighty, looking down on Trump and his supporters with disdain. This is a legitimate danger, and certainly is the case from time to time.

Yet, that doesn’t suddenly nullify the fact that the presidency requires a certain set of skills that Trump hasn’t been shown to possess. Nick Saban’s an incredible coach; you think he’s great because of his ability to pump up his team with pep talks? Maybe he gives amazing speeches, but that’s entirely unrelated to his ability to study the next opponent, choose his starters, pick plays, decide what to drill, etc.

Above all else, the President of the United States has to be nice. [JF note: What the reader calls “nice” is what I think of as an advanced ability to imagine how an adversary might be thinking and feeling, so as to give offense only when that is exactly what you intend to do.] Why? World leaders are surprisingly fickle people (like all of us), and the slightest offense can hurt the United States abroad and at home. Trump is like the guy at the movies who yells “NO!” when the protagonist’s lover dies. Sure, he’s saying what he thinks, but that doesn't mean everyone needs to hear it.

2. Liberals crying wolf. A reader says that liberals have sneered so much at “uninformed” conservatives that they’re out of terms for a person who really doesn’t know anything:

The dissenting opinion in your “Does Trump Think?” column (part three) was misguided in a lot of ways but brought up an interesting point. There’s something that I think could inform how people who think Trump is truly dangerous (like myself) choose to engage with the situation.

Liberals (in general—not you or your readers in particular) have a hard time reconciling why Trump supporters can’t see how truly vacuous and without substance he is. Obviously the primary responsibility for this lies with those supporters, but we could be playing a much bigger part in bringing them to the light if our credibility weren't somewhat shattered. And we made that bed.

Republicans for about 25 years have thrown knee-jerk insults at Democrats that all relate to elitism and common sense. Liberals’ complement to this tendency is to insult the intelligence of conservatives. Ronald Reagan was stupid, George Bush was stupid, and Sarah Palin was stupid. George Bush made bad decisions and was not ridiculed as ineffective or poorly informed but as an absolute imbecile. (I read a somewhat silly study where someone had attempted to estimate presidential IQs by statements in the public record and Bush was on the low end of presidents with a 135—which is borderline genius level IQ.)

This is obviously a silly undertaking, but it illustrates the point that a person who we reflexively insult and call an absolute idiot is probably an incredibly intelligent and competent man who just didn't do his best work as president.) Sarah Palin is another case of a clearly intelligent and savvy woman who was woefully unprepared but ridiculed as stupid. [JF note: as I wrote many times during his tenure, I thought that George W. Bush was not “stupid” in any normal sense. Rather I thought he had a combination of ignorance, in the sense of not being broadly informed; lack of curiosity, which limited his ability to correct the ignorance problem; and a desire to be, or at least seem, decisive, rather than risk seeming “hesitant” or “vacillating.” The combination was toxic in the rush toward war in Iraq.]

We have now cried wolf. Someone has now come along who is so obviously completely without the mental equipment to do this job and our criticism falls on deaf ears. We have taught his supporters that we can't be trusted to make that assessment objectively.

***

3. And finally, a reader on different standards for racism and sexism, and on the line between what is considered “stupid” and what is called “evil”:

Trump and his followers say they feel silenced. They’re not wrong. I mean, their First Amendment rights are clearly still intact, but apart from that, it’s certainly true that one of the most likely things you’ll encounter if you try to say something racist is the command to hush.

What happens when the command to hush fails? Well, apparently what happens is that polite society screws up its nose and then says, airily, “You don’t mean that.”

“You don’t mean that” is what you say to your toddler when he says he hates Uncle Bob. It’s what you say to your 15-year-old daughter when she tells you she’s moving out. In short, it’s what you say if you want to silence and patronise.

But the fascinating thing about this new form of attempted silencing is that it actually helps racist people rather than hindering them. Trump doesn’t have to dog-whistle; he can just whistle and then a bunch of well-meaning people will explain that he didn’t actually mean to whistle per se, he only wanted the attention.

So much dodging around the idea of racism! Trump doesn’t mean that; he’s just saying it to make people talk about him. His followers don’t really believe that of their own accord; they’re being led astray. It’s okay, none of these people actually think. I mean, wouldn’t it be dreadful if they could think, and they chose to think that?

It’s instructive to look at the differences between the way we treat racism, in this regard, and the way we treat sexism. It’s much rarer for sexism to be classified as something perpetrated only by stupid people.

That’s because we view racism through the lens of class. Racism is seen as being primarily perpetrated by poor people, whereas sexism implicates rich and poor alike. This happens, I think, because rich white people can avoid black people much more easily. [JF note: through spelling details and other touches, I think this note is not from an American. I think that people raised in the U.S. would know that the more precise phrasing would be, “rich white people can avoid poor black people more easily — and can avoid poor whites as well.”) Rich people can take advantage of a societal structure that pushes black people away for them. [JF: again, I would add “poor.”] They don’t have to put any effort in, and can thus absolve themselves of any responsibility.

If we truly believe ourselves to be thinkers, who judge the world after careful consideration rather than knee-jerk reactions, we should question this classism that drives the way we paper over racism.

Trump’s supporters are not just being blindly led. Like many capitalist Americans, they like the idea of a world in which there are “winners” and “losers.” They like that world even better if they, and people who look like them, are given an automatic leg up towards the “winner” category. That’s not exactly stupid. It’s just evil.

Following the previous items in this series, a clinical psychologist from a big Southern city writes:

GOP convention photo, 2016 (Wikipedia)

In your coverage of Trump’s candidacy, the discussion of how his mind works is fascinating. I’ve been interested in this and thinking about it for a while. I agree with the reader who wrote, “I am afraid that Trump’s speech is no longer looked at as carrying actual content. Instead, it has become pure gesture, merely indicating moods and relationships rather than explicit ideas.”

I suggest that the relationships that his speech is organized around are consistently what I would call “Doer and Done-To” relationships. [JF note: Also famous in Lenin’s distinction, “who / whom.”]

Trump exploits the choreography of Perpetrator-Victim theatre to position himself as the one his listeners should align with and trust to lead them to escape the Done-To position and enjoy the privileged Doer position. Of course, there are many in America who also experience life largely through this lens and find in Trump someone they can relate to on a deeply felt emotional level.

And, there are also many in America who can reasonably assert they have been Done-To in one way or another. Not all of them aspire to simply switch positions with the Doers (“Winners” in Trump’s immature view of what constitutes a functional society) and have their turn “at the top.” But many do.

One morning a while back I found myself lying in bed (having awoken long before the alarm was going to go off) thinking about this and came up with a kind of psychological routine that I imagine Trump follows over and over again. I imagined him guided by a personal mantra: “Inflate, Ingratiate, Intimidate.”

I don’t imagine he reflects on any of this much. I think he has “way of life” that he believes in and that he believes is or ought to be the American Way of Life, but I don’t think he’s ever reflected much on any other way of being in the world or in relation to others than that which is captured in (a) Doer and Done-To and (b) Inflate, Ingratiate, Intimidate as needed.

For more in the topic of how Trump’s mind works, I refer you to this section from the wonderful book The Growth of the Mind And the Endangered Origins of Intelligence, by Stanley Greenspan, M.D. (with Beryl Lieff Benderly, 1997, Perseus Books). This is found on pages 165-167:

I noted earlier the phenomenon of projection, in which one person ascribes his own feelings to another. An even more powerful though less recognized tendency, I believe, is the projection not simply of emotions or attitudes but of one’s own mental structure and level of awareness onto other people.

A person able to reflect in at least some emotional areas may assume that everyone else can do the same. This phenomenon is especially apparent in literary characters whose capacities for self-reflection are more similar to the author’s than to that of a typical person in the situation in question. Hamlet’s soliloquy about the value of existence surely reflects Shakespeare’s own matchless ability to translate feelings into words. In the voice of Huck Finn we hear Mark Twain’s moral reasoning about the fate of Jim. Outside of literature we might expect a boy like Huck to act at the decisive moment for reasons he does not understand and a despondent man to sink wordlessly into a morass of despair.

Many adults probably cannot reflect on their feelings to a significant degree, and many who can do so only in certain areas…. The ideal of the perfectly reflective human is about as illusory as the ideal of the perfectly fit or healthy one -- the person whose weight, blood pressure, cholesterol level, blood count, eyesight, and the rest -- match the medical textbook model of the human body. Each of us has some physical flaws and weaknesses. Ideals of good health, or perfect weight and lipid levels, of good vision and a vigorous heart remain, however, goals that we can all keep in mind as we live our daily lives.

Where exactly do we stand on the ladder of the developmental stage? Clinical experience suggests that most of us operate in a less than optimal way. I would estimate that only a minority of adults, probably no more than 20 to 30 percent, function at the higher levels… The rest range from those who can label feelings but can’t easily see connections among them through those who react to life with polarized affects to those who live mostly in a world of behavioral discharge in which feelings are coterminous with actions or physical states. Finally, there are those who live at a level in which thinking, behavior, or both are quite disorganized….

The measure of a person’s mental functioning is how she responds to a wide range of challenges and how stable her responses remain in stress or crisis. Is she able to maintain reflectiveness when she is hurt, scared, insulted, disappointed, rejected, worried, exhausted, or rushed [or adored, worshipped, or idealized]? Or does she slip back into rigid forms of responding, polarized thinking, or concrete action modes?..

In my clinical practice I often find it useful to reflect in a particular way on what is happening in the conversations I have with my patients. I invite them to reflect on this with me and to also learn to reflect in this particular way on conversations they have with others. The question guiding this way of reflecting is, “Am I doing something To, With, or For you?”…

Collaboration involves doing something With others. Seduction involves doing something To others while fooling them into believing it’s something we’re doing With them and/or For them. Good leadership involves all three, wisely and judiciously deployed, in the service of the leader’s community, organization, or team.

Trump is profoundly impaired in his capacity to Do With others. He cannot collaborate in any meaningful way with others. He can, very effectively, seduce others into thinking he is collaborating and doing something With them but I’m pretty sure he’s actually doing something To them….

I see his psychology as highly organized around the ambition to be in the Doing To Others position in all relationships. I see him as being able to effectively mimic Doing For and Doing With behavior—so effectively that he actually feels he is sincere even when he is plainly not—and use this mimicry in his pursuit of the Doing To position.

What’s most frightening to me in all of this has to do with what Trump’s effectiveness in winning the GOP nomination suggests has happened to the GOP and to our society at large.

***

For the record, here is a response from a reader offended by the whole idea of wondering whether Trump really thinks:

Do your correspondents not have any self-consciousness? Do they not hear themselves? “I went to college so I’m smart. Trump voters didn’t go to college so they’re stupid. Hillary went to Yale Law School so she’s really smart and should be president. Trump went to Penn but only got in because of his father so he’s dumb.” [JF note: Disagree. The objection to Trump is based on the vacuity of what he actually says.]

But these people really believe this shit, apparently. I won’t bother trying to tell you how smart I am. But the guy who fixes your car is as smart as these people, with the bonus that he deals with physical reality, and doesn’t get paid if your car doesn’t work.

The idea that “blue state” people deal in sophisticated analytical thinking “like a surgeon” is pretty ridiculous. (Aside: This person is not smart enough to understand what surgeons do. It’s mostly just like fixing a car, but since you can die it’s done by high IQ college graduates rather than somewhat above average IQ high school graduates.) They mostly deal with soft abstracts where things are only subjectively right. Hillary probably scores pretty high on an IQ test, but even the top law schools are only teaching what the socially approved answers are, which change regularly.

Trump is not talking to you. There is no point for him to try to communicate with you because you wouldn’t support him under any circumstances so he doesn’t bother. If Jeb was now the nominee, the candidate who worked the hardest to make himself acceptable to the left, you would still be tearing him apart. [JF note: No. If Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, or John Kasich were the nominee, I would hope their side didn’t win, because I disagree with the current GOP stand on domestic policy, foreign policy, environmental and climate policy, budget policy, military policy, judicial appointments, and so on. But I would never suggest that these people were grossly unqualified for office, which is the case with Trump. I was glad that Barack Obama won re-election over Mitt Romney, because I preferred Obama’s policies. But no sane person could suggest that Romney was unqualified by background or unfit by temperament to be president, which again is true of Trump. Sarah Palin is much more knowledgeable (really) and would be a better president than Trump.]

So all the nice, respectable people think Trump is dumb and evil. So what? We don't care. What about this don’t you understand? I would really try to explain it to you if you really wanted to know.

I won’t respond in kind, to this reader who writes in under a pseudonym, because I would regret doing so. I’ll say: consider the evidence and judge for yourself.

A shorter dissent:

Its obvious you think Trump is an idiot. Do you have a billion dollars and a smokin hot wife? I didn’t think so....so who really is the stupid one?

In response to last night’s item on whether Trump’s rally speeches, interview remarks, and Tweets should be understood as conveying ideas of any sort, as opposed to being pure acts of tribal/resentment signaling and emotion, readers offer further analyses.

It is about addiction. From a reader in the tech industry:

Your reader who compared Trump’s need for attention to drug addiction made a very important point, but I think it applies at a much more basic, fundamental level.

Since the Tea Party and movement conservatives began to push the Republican Party past rational boundaries and into the realm of bark-at-the-moon crazy, politicians and pundits have been throwing chunks of bloody red meat to the base voters.

But a problem arose. Once a level of outrageous rhetoric was achieved, it no longer provided the “hit” that the people or the media wanted. Someone had to come along and up the ante to kick-start the next round of howling anger. You got “death panels,” you got “Obama’s a Muslim,” you got “Mexicans are rapists”—it just has to keep escalating.

And Trump saw this clearly, so he came out and one-upped everybody. And now he’s on round two, and he knows instinctively he needs to one-up himself. Stand by: Round three will start about September …

***

‘Thinking’ as cultural dividing line. From a reader who grew up in the South:

I have a reaction to the first reader you quote in “Does Trump Think?” The reader states, “His listeners are not looking for meaning. Instead, they are thrilled by the emotion of his speeches."

I grew up in the Deep South, surrounded by the white blue-collar culture that we describe now as the Trump base vote. I recognized my inner Yankee and got out after high school. I suspect that people who didn’t grow up as I did don’t realize the extent to which “thinking” is a cultural dividing line—specifically the kind of analytical thinking that us college-educated, blue-state elite prize as the professional approach to problem solving.

To be sure, these guys would laud analytical thinking in their surgeon in the hours before going under the knife, but the culture only rewards that kind of thinking in certain times and situations (generally scientific) and scorns it when applied to the moral questions of daily life that our current politics turns on. Questions of morals or fairness or justice should be resolved, in their minds, by “common sense,” informed by family, local culture, and religion. (And untangling that from race is nearly impossible.)

I'm painting with a broad brush, but in these enclaves, it’s just good common sense that (pick your Other) blacks / Mexicans / Muslims are different and often dangerous. Trump tells them they don’t have to deny that core knowledge and cover it up anymore with “politically correct” language. They don’t want to change their thinking. They don’t want to swap what they know emotionally about right and wrong for some broader but colder perspective.

I believe Hillary will win because enough people, including other factions of Republicans, think that the job of President requires a set of credentials more akin to a surgeon than a crowd-pleaser at Gilley’s. But that Gilley’s crowd—they don’t want Trump to “think,” at least not in the way you and I think of thinking.

P.S. If I could footnote my broad brush statements above, I’d direct you to a fascinating book by Kieran Egan called The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. He describes how rigorous high school and college education changes a person’s worldview. It’s the “why” behind the values divide we often see in political polling between more educated and less-educated voters.

***

From a reader who grew up in the U.S. and now lives in Europe:

I agree with some who assert that what Trump says does not matter that much to his supporters. Or maybe by “not saying much” while he’s talking, Trump, deliberately or otherwise, leaves plenty of room for his audience to interpret his words any way they want to. (Isn’t this what clever Gypsy fortune tellers are supposedly good at?)

What Trump says does not make sense, ever, in terms of putting forth ideas. But Trump is not attempting to put forth ideas. Trump is attempting to put forth Trump. At that, Trump has so far been very successful.

We need to keep in mind what Trump might be thinking about, what questions Trump is asking himself. I believe Trump only asks himself one question, or variations on one question: What is good for Trump? This is not a revelation. But some of us seem to forget this when Trump starts talking. It is we who are addicted to making sense of communication, we who insist that people “make sense.” But we err when we assume that people are trying to make sense with their words.

Trump may possibly not be thinking. Or he may be thinking a lot. But if Trump is not thinking, then we have a lot to answer for explaining how he has succeeded thus far. For what does it say about the ability of people around him to think, if he so consistently has thwarted some supposedly capable people?

Trump is not a complicated creature. He is distinctive, but not unique, in his selfishness. But I think it’s best we keep in mind what his motivations are. On that basis, Trump, for me, is indeed doing something we can call thinking.

“Bozo’s Circus,” from the Bozo the Clown oeuvre. Hmmm, why does this image keep coming to mind this year? (Wikipedia)

In response to recent Time Capsule entries, readers suggest that I am missing the obvious point: that neither Trump nor his audience expects his statements actually to mean anything. I think the three comments below point toward an emerging, important insight about the spectacle of Trump-era politics.

One reader writes (emphasis added):

I enjoyed your piece on Trump’s Gilley’s goof-up. But you overlooked the most recent and well-publicized example of a politician being pilloried over such a faux pas: Ted Cruz’s infamous comments about the “basketball ring” he made during his final campaign push in Indiana. These tin-eared attempts to pander to hoops-loving Hoosiers were a widely covered part of Cruz’s failed efforts to unseat Trump as GOP leader in the primaries.

Now why Ted is expected to know all about basketball (which is, after all, the 2nd most popular spectator sport in the U.S.) and Donald is given a pass for not knowing the bull (when we all know that he is more familiar with “bull” than any other person alive) is an interesting question. I am sure Trump was quite aware of Debra Winger at the time of Urban Cowboy. And he was clearly aware of the device, which is why he commented on it in the first place.

I am afraid that Trump’s speech is no longer looked at as carrying actual content.Instead, it has become pure gesture, merely indicating moods and relationships rather than explicit ideas.

A Trump rally in some ways resembles a rock concert, where the crowd cheers at one point in the program for the angry song, later for the big ballad, and goes crazy at the end when the singer does his biggest hit (in Trump’s case, the Mexican Wall bit). His rhetoric is so transparently pure rhetoric, so layered with dog whistles and emotional words that modify no actual nouns or verbs, that his listeners are not looking for meaning. Instead, they are thrilled by the emotion of his speeches, which are only possible because has liberated himself from the usual quotidian purposes of language.

By speaking all the time in the style of a commercial’s tag-line, he has escaped even the expectation that his words will have a meaning when written down or recorded. This is why so many supporters can say they disagree with what he says, but love him for saying it “like it is.” He captures a feeling that goes beyond rational thought. It is the political equivalent of the incoherent swearing a man does when he hits his thumb while trying to hammer a nail: It’s an outburst of urgent emotion with no logical structure.

I’m a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, about four years sober. It just occurred to me that the entire Trump campaign to date makes more sense if you look at Trump as if he were a drug addict—only instead of being addicted to drugs, he’s addicted to attention.

Like a drug addict whose tolerance increases and requires a larger and larger dose to get the same effect, Trump’s need for attention keeps growing larger and larger. He's pretty much at the pinnacle now, with just about the entire world fixated on him, and in order to keep getting his fix, he needs to keep saying crazy stuff to stay in the headlines.

Like most addicts he’ll eventually overdo it, come crashing down, and hit bottom. If this is actually the case, it’s not so much the presidency he’s interested in for its own sake; it would merely be a vehicle for him to pursue his addiction to its logical extreme.

***

Finally, a reader disagrees with an item in which I said: “A real president, or real presidential candidate, would be informed enough to know that Muslim immigrants to the U.S. have been notable for their assimilation, not the reverse.”

The reader writes:

I believe you are misconstruing the meaning here. You are taking Trump far too much at his word.

Trump is not thinking, these American Muslims don’t assimilate therefore they are an attractive target. He is not thinking at all. He is very informed about Muslim immigrants. His hair specialist is one, Mohammad Ali Ivari, and surely he knows many others. He simply is not thinking at all.

Journalists, yourself included, need to stop taking him at his word. His points are not thought-out commentary; they are simply the free-form stylings of an ignoramus who is seeking self-aggrandizement. You are giving his words too much weight to consider that reflect a sincere and informed judgement. They are simply the ramblings of a man who only knows what he read in today’s paper and what his gut says his audience wants to hear.

A silver lining of this dark political moment: a lot of people around the world are thinking seriously about the dynamics of American politics and the info-ecology that underlies it.

Unfortunately, the Republican party is about to nominate a man who is not one of these people. And the “respectable” leaders of the Vichy Republican camp — Ryan, McConnell, Priebus, McCain, Rubio, Christie, Huntsman, Gingrich, now Roger Ailes — are still lining up behind him.

Most of the Japanese writing merely says “Trump” (トランプ, Toranpu), or “President.” Though the TV screen at time 0:17 nicely says “Trump is God”(トランプ・イズ・ゴッド), and the closing credits say トランプ 万歳 . This is “Trump Banzai!” or “May Trump Live Ten Thousand Years!” (It also appears at time 0:56.) You would normally say Banzai! to the emperor.

If Trump made this the official campaign video I would consider voting for him.

Thanks to my friends at the U.S. Studies Centre in Sydney for the tip.Thanks to Mike Diva for the video.

Like many people who spend too much time on Twitter, I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.

“They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me: His smugness, radiating from under that red MAGA hat, was everything I wanted my teenagers not to be.

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

The death of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun.

“Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

As sure as Jesus’s words proved prescient about the adoption of Christianity in the empire that killed him, so too the modern-day legend of King writes itself in real time. In the official story told to children, King’s assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome.

President Donald Trump is trapped. He shut the government to impose his will on the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. That plan has miserably failed. Instead, Trump has found himself caught in the trap he supposed he had set for his opponents.

Now he is desperately seeking an exit.

Trump attempted Exit One on January 8.He spoke that evening to the nation from the Oval Office, hoping to mobilize public opinion behind him, pressing the Democratic leadership of the House to yield to him. That hope was miserably disappointed. Surveys post-speech found that Trump had swayed only 2 percent of TV viewers. In the 10 days since the speech, Trump’s approval ratings have dipped to about the lowest point in his presidency. The supposedly solid Trump base has measurably softened.

Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.

On January 20, 2017,Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

The civil-rights leader is now celebrated as a modern founding father, a celebration that gives those who oppose his policy agenda a claim to his legacy.

Every year, on the third Monday in January, people play their hand at the same game. “What would Martin Luther King Jr. think?” becomes an unwritten essay prompt for op-eds, a topic of speeches and sermons, a call to action, and a societal rebuke. In this annual pageant, there are few who would ever mark themselves as living in opposition to the legacy of King, even as they work to dismantle it.

It was only natural that Vice President Mike Pence would quote King in defense of President Donald Trump’s decision to continue the ongoing government shutdown until he receives full funding for a border wall. “One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was: ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy’,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, citing King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. “You think of how he changed America. He inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on Congress to do: Come to the table in the spirit of good faith.”

She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.

Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.

Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

[Please see Updates at the end of this post.] I don’t know who the young man in the MAGA hat in this photo is. And I don’t care to know.

His name, which the internet will inevitably turn up, really doesn’t matter. It matters to his parents, of course—and to his teachers. I hope they will be reflective, and I know they should be ashamed: of this smirking young man and the scores of other (nearly all white) students from a Catholic school in Kentucky. Today, on the National Mall in Washington, they apparently mocked, harassed, and menaced a Native American man who had fought for the United States in Vietnam and who today represented both the U.S. and his Omaha nation with poise, courage, and dignity.

The senator from Massachusetts announced she was running for president on New Year’s Eve—and then had the field largely to herself.

CLAREMONT, N.H.—Elizabeth Warren wants the look on her face to be funny. It’s somewhere between stern and confused and disappointed, complete with fists briefly on her hips, like she’s playing a mom in a commercial who just found an adorable kid making a mess on the floor.

That’s how the senator from Massachusetts responds late Friday when I ask her what she thinks will happen if the rest of the Democratic primary field doesn’t follow her lead and put talking about the economy at the center of their campaigns.

“I don’t know how anyone could not talk about the economy—and corruption!—and diagnose what’s wrong in America today. I just don’t know how they could do it,” she said, then added with a little snark creeping in to her voice, “Good luck …”

“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.”

In April 1963, King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, after he defied a state court’s injunction and led a march of black protesters without a permit, urging an Easter boycott of white-owned stores. A statement published in The Birmingham News, written by eight moderate white clergymen, criticized the march and other demonstrations.

This prompted King to write a lengthy response, begun in the margins of the newspaper. He smuggled it out with the help of his lawyer, and the nearly 7,000 words were transcribed. The eloquent call for “constructive, nonviolent tension” to force an end to unjust laws became a landmark document of the civil-rights movement. The letter was printed in part or in full by several publications, including the New York Post, Liberation magazine, The New Leader, and The Christian Century. The Atlantic published it in the August 1963 issue.

Like many people who spend too much time on Twitter, I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.

“They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me: His smugness, radiating from under that red MAGA hat, was everything I wanted my teenagers not to be.

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

The death of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun.

“Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

As sure as Jesus’s words proved prescient about the adoption of Christianity in the empire that killed him, so too the modern-day legend of King writes itself in real time. In the official story told to children, King’s assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome.

President Donald Trump is trapped. He shut the government to impose his will on the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. That plan has miserably failed. Instead, Trump has found himself caught in the trap he supposed he had set for his opponents.

Now he is desperately seeking an exit.

Trump attempted Exit One on January 8.He spoke that evening to the nation from the Oval Office, hoping to mobilize public opinion behind him, pressing the Democratic leadership of the House to yield to him. That hope was miserably disappointed. Surveys post-speech found that Trump had swayed only 2 percent of TV viewers. In the 10 days since the speech, Trump’s approval ratings have dipped to about the lowest point in his presidency. The supposedly solid Trump base has measurably softened.

Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.

On January 20, 2017,Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

The civil-rights leader is now celebrated as a modern founding father, a celebration that gives those who oppose his policy agenda a claim to his legacy.

Every year, on the third Monday in January, people play their hand at the same game. “What would Martin Luther King Jr. think?” becomes an unwritten essay prompt for op-eds, a topic of speeches and sermons, a call to action, and a societal rebuke. In this annual pageant, there are few who would ever mark themselves as living in opposition to the legacy of King, even as they work to dismantle it.

It was only natural that Vice President Mike Pence would quote King in defense of President Donald Trump’s decision to continue the ongoing government shutdown until he receives full funding for a border wall. “One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was: ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy’,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, citing King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. “You think of how he changed America. He inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on Congress to do: Come to the table in the spirit of good faith.”

She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.

Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.

Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

[Please see Updates at the end of this post.] I don’t know who the young man in the MAGA hat in this photo is. And I don’t care to know.

His name, which the internet will inevitably turn up, really doesn’t matter. It matters to his parents, of course—and to his teachers. I hope they will be reflective, and I know they should be ashamed: of this smirking young man and the scores of other (nearly all white) students from a Catholic school in Kentucky. Today, on the National Mall in Washington, they apparently mocked, harassed, and menaced a Native American man who had fought for the United States in Vietnam and who today represented both the U.S. and his Omaha nation with poise, courage, and dignity.

“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.”

In April 1963, King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, after he defied a state court’s injunction and led a march of black protesters without a permit, urging an Easter boycott of white-owned stores. A statement published in The Birmingham News, written by eight moderate white clergymen, criticized the march and other demonstrations.

This prompted King to write a lengthy response, begun in the margins of the newspaper. He smuggled it out with the help of his lawyer, and the nearly 7,000 words were transcribed. The eloquent call for “constructive, nonviolent tension” to force an end to unjust laws became a landmark document of the civil-rights movement. The letter was printed in part or in full by several publications, including the New York Post, Liberation magazine, The New Leader, and The Christian Century. The Atlantic published it in the August 1963 issue.

America’s largest internet store is so big, and so bewildering, that buyers often have no idea what they’re going to get.

Updated at 5:28 p.m. ET on January 17, 2019.

There’s a Gatorade button attached to my basement fridge. If I push it, two days later a crate of the sports drink shows up at my door, thanks to Amazon. When these “Dash buttons” were first rumored in 2015, they seemed like a joke. Press a button to one-click detergent or energy bars? What even?, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance reasonably inquired.

They weren’t a joke. Soon enough, Amazon was selling the buttons for a modest fee, the value of which would be applied to your first purchase. There were Dash buttons for Tide and Gatorade, Fiji Water and Lärabars, Trojan condoms and Kraft Mac & Cheese.

The whole affair always felt unsettling. When the buttons launched, I called the Dash experience Lovecraftian, the invisible miasma of commerce slipping its vapor all around your home. But last week, a German court went further, ruling the buttons illegal because they fail to give consumers sufficient information about the products they order when pressing them, or the price they will pay after having done so. (You set up a Dash button on Amazon’s app, selecting a product from a list; like other goods on the e-commerce giant’s website, the price can change over time.) Amazon, which is also under general antitrust investigation in Germany, disputes the ruling.